us: “When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around” (DG 59).

With Damascus Gate, his protagonist's quagmire has become principally a religious one. Israel may be the site of an east-west political struggle, but what disturbs Lucas particularly is that men will kill each other over questions of whom God has chosen and what God wills. By their nature, Stone's secular readers would likely share Lucas's skepticism about taking sides in such disputes. Lucas argues with Sonia, the female protagonist of Damascus Gate—a woman capable of commitments, both religious and social—that she is “too hip and beautiful and smart to believe this garbage” (DG 171), referring to her following a man named De Kuff who claims to be the Messiah. Similarly, Stone's readers regard themselves as too hip or smart to believe such garbage. Yet, as Stone has repeatedly demonstrated before with his decadent leftists, excessive skepticism has its problems, leaving one alienated, impotent, and dispirited, doubtful of his or her own humanity. His secular ironists are likewise adrift. Stone has claimed, perhaps inaccurately, to be the only American novelist addressing theological questions (rpt. in Woods 44). He seemingly wants and needs to focus on our neglected ontological state, evidently believing that his audience needs this as well. So what haunts his readers this time is how avidly Lucas searches for something more than “silence overhead, darkness around.” Stone has said that he sees his audience particularly as “people who had some intense experience with the sixties” (qtd. in Woods 44), a decade when meaningful political action seemed possible, when new spiritual revelations seemed conceivable, a time for which many readers might well feel nostalgia. Yet typically Stone's principals, Converse and Marge in Dog Soldiers, and Holliwell in A Flag for Sunrise, have seemed removed from the passions of the sixties, political or spiritual, even if they once partook of them. Now with Damascus Gate, Stone reenters that era's mindset more fully.

Stone's principal characters are typically alienated intellectuals—those best among us who still lack all conviction, as if we had come little distance from the non-believing Hemingway protagonist whose mitigating grace was more or less holding together in the face of nothingness. Stone's characters, however, obviously seek more than Hemingway's pleasure in things pleasant, clean, and well lighted. Stone takes a kind of sixties' pleasure in things ecstatic, ranging from the highs of drugs and alcohol to religious frenzy, from the sacred realm of art to the throes of sexual passion. In a desperate fashion, Stone resurrects Hemingway's various opiums of the people.³ Thus while Stone—what with his empty protagonists—may appear postmodern, his books seemingly cling to an idea of presence. If to some seekers in Damascus Gate, “Everything is Torah,” implying the word, written in fire, underlies all creation, Stone celebrates language as well. But his language has a cracked and schizoid relation to reality and cannot assuage the sense of existential dread that haunts his world.

In this sense, Stone's characters have always been tormented by a religious itch, and not surprisingly, his secular fallen leftists have even greater problems accommodating religious visions than political ones. Early on in Dog Soldiers, Converse mysteriously tries to pick up an older widowed missionary woman in Saigon, a woman who then tells him that “Satan is very powerful here” (DS [Dog Soldiers] 9. Perversely, Converse chooses to run dope because—after his disillusion with a war where elephants are being pursued by helicopters—it seemed necessary there “be something” (DS 25), this something having a religious resonance. His peculiar sense of the supernatural is based on fear. He believes religiously in the “moral necessity of his annihilation” (DS 185). Later we find ourselves in the mountains near the Mexican border at a hippie commune that has outlived its time and is presided over by an aging guru, Dieter, who seems to have slipped from Buddhist visions to an addiction to homemade wine. Like Dieter, this flashback to acid epiphanies of the sixties has a flaccid quality to it. Moreover, Converse is fascinated by Hick's Samurai charm, his pretense to Eastern spirituality. Hicks dies in a sort of Buddhist trance. In a burst of ecstatic writing found toward the conclusion of Dog Soldiers, Stone shows Hicks using a Zen technique to detach himself from pain, attempting to die well, still pretending to be a true Samurai.

In A Flag for Sunrise, Stone's ultimate decadent leftist, Holliwell, evinces, nonetheless, a fascination with Sister Justin, a woman who was one of those “who believed in things and acted according to what they believed” (FS [A Flag for Sunrise] 101). Indeed, we find the most compelling ruminations in this highly political book occur in the minds of a heterodox, drunken priest, and a nun who senses God's presence as she is beaten to death. Although tedious in terms of narration, intellectually Stone remains arresting while exploring through Father Egan a gnostic alternative to Christianity, the lotus within the flower. Yet at his strongest narrative moment, the description of Justin's murder, we experience along with Justin her sense of the divine that comes in the brief interlude between the shocks to her body: “then something began to come. … Stronger than the strong, stronger than love” (FS 416). The “trickster” Christ gives her the last word, which she flings at her tormentor, a final cosmic joke: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (FS 416).

In Owen Browne's last days at sea in Outerbridge Reach, he is obsessed with the nature of religious truth. Here in Stone's widest ranging theological speculation, Owen rejects the Christian sermons he hears on his short wave radio and meditates his way to the heart of a gnostic truth wherein he explores God's absence, His hiddenness, and finds finally—as John Leonard writes in The Nation—not God but Darwin. Browne, who heretofore had been a straight arrow instead of one of Stone's tribe of decadent leftists, has lost both his conventional idea of himself as decent and his sense of a supportive friendly God. He cannot return home, so he flings himself overboard. Typically, Stone's fascination with religion intertwines with the conundrum of death.

Stone has always liked to have his reluctant religious pilgrims traveling, like Browne at sea, as if we might only sense our contingent and ephemeral relation to the world and our proximity to death by being dislocated. For these pilgrimages, Stone's protagonists have come a long way from home in order to explore alternatives to the spiritual dearth that characterizes contemporary consumer America. Thus Stone's novels often have the quality of travel narratives: their alien settings are the locus of a twentieth-century apocalypse, religious and/or political, and their protagonists are tourists who have wandered into threatening situations both over their heads and beyond their means. Converse of Dog Soldiers wallows in Vietnam; Holliwell of A Flag for Sunrise lurches about in some Nicaragua-like country. The setting of Damascus Gate is principally Jerusalem, with forays to other locations in Israel, particularly the Gaza Strip. But despite being on the scene, Stone's marginal, dislocated men witness the mêlée—like Washingtonians going out in carriages to watch Civil War battles—from the sidelines. Trying to avoid being caught up, they stay high. Still they encounter the outlandish without the protection of any myth. Owen Browne, on his own perilous, lonely sea voyage, reads other accounts of such expeditions in the course of his trip and learns that most such narratives are lies, dwelling as they often do on the teller's courage in the face of the void. In contrast, Stone's travel stories ring true because they are harrowing accounts of psychic dislocation made tolerable only by our willingness to accept absurd juxtapositions with a numbed detachment. Of his future on the road, Lucas tells Sonia, “I'll be in Phnom Penh. Look for me at the Café No Problem. To find the Café No Problem, you turn left at the Genocide Museum” (DG 493). Like Stone voyagers before him, Lucas travels to experience the terrible incongruities of the contemporary world, justifying thereby his voyeurism, but also ironically provoking his longing for involvement. Appropriately, the conflagration overtakes Stone's wanderers; they find themselves in over their heads, out there, exposed in a conflict that seemingly did not concern them. Lucas is drawn particularly toward the central religious tussle of our time in Jerusalem, all the while maintaining that he is in Israel to cure himself of his “fond, silly regard for religion” (DG 8).

Often, however, the location Stone takes us to is not particularly geographical, but a figurative postmodern place—an environment of heightened, nearly surreal, possibility—where the reader must decide ultimately among possibilities for belief without any authoritative guidance. The best fictional example of this sort of multiple choice game occurs in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 where Oedipa Maas sees clearly her choices in regards to believing in a mystical postal system called the Trystero, through which real meaning might be communicated. Her alternatives are these: she is hallucinating; she is the victim of a plot against her (even paranoids have enemies); she has gone insane, or she has stumbled onto a real alternative to the meaninglessness of the modern world. Novelists as dissimilar to Pynchon as John Updike, John Fowles, and John Gardner have similarly set up choices like these. For Stone in Damascus Gate, the duo of De Kuff, a bipolar (manic depressive) visionary, and Raziel, a drugged musician, provides three of these possibilities: hallucinatory visions—a major episode takes place with all the characters on Ecstasy; insanity—De Kuff is after all certifiable and Raziel is a flake; and real meaning—De Kuff's internal relation to past Messiahs has a certain cogency, a certain riveting appeal. At other places, a mixture of Shin Bet (Israel's version of the CIA), American fundamentalists, and Jewish right wing extremists provide us with the bizarre paranoid plot, one that includes an attempt by some to blow up the mosque on the Temple Mount. But whereas Pynchon never really chooses among his four possibilities, Stone holds out here for the possibility of religious truth in a manner that he has not before in his writing. Moreover, unlike Pynchon, Stone remains conventional in terms of realism and characterization. In part, Pynchon readers remain suspended among Oedipa's choices because no one knows finally how we should regard her. Might she be only a cartoon?

In Stone's case, even if his characters doubt their own reality, the reader believes in them. They are altogether too recognizable. Such marginalized, depressed, and alcohol-befogged types force an identification for many because they are as close as we are going to get to a sensibility we recognize. The problem seems more one of whether they merit sympathy. When teaching a Stone novel—I've worked with Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise—I have had to face student hostility toward characters who have nothing admirable about them. Only Sister Justin, with her religious doubt and political passion, stirs a mixture of pity and respect. Nonetheless, as a female character, Justin remains more object than subject in a masculine world characterized by Holliwell's hard-drinking paralyzing despair. Robert Solataroff has argued, however, that Stone gives us enough complexity to identify with even his most degenerate characters, thus rendering people such as Holliwell and Hicks compelling.⁴ Now with Damascus Gate, Stone has provided us with both male and female protagonists who merit sympathy, particularly in the seriousness with which they search for an elusive God.

Stone's long-term religious obsession evolves ironically from his sense of God's absence. As Solataroff has noted, “God's presence as a form of absence is to varying degrees inscribed into each of Stone's five novels” (20). With Damascus Gate and its more sympathetic seekers, we find Stone moving toward a sort of spiritual resolution. After a long engagement with gnostic theology, Stone here twists God's absence until it yields a kind of spiritual presence. He transforms here his belief in unbelief into something his protagonist can live with. Lucas's ultimate revelation is that “losing it is as good as having it” (DG 499), as if we can only know sumptuousness after losing it.⁵ What he means is that he can now accept a religion based solely on longing and desire, one where seeking is already a form of belief.⁶ Thereby Stone leads his secular audience closer to a spiritual realm.

With Lucas, Stone depicts someone more or less like Holliwell, but he justifies better here the character's ambivalence and allows more reason for Stone's typical reader to identify with him. Although Lucas has gone to Israel to take the cure for religious addiction, the fallen Catholic and one-time religion major that he is still wants to believe.⁷ Lucas, like his inventor, seems unable to leave his Catholic childhood behind him. For example, in a moment of regression, Lucas becomes frantic when locked out of a chapel where German monks are saying mass. Later he rationalizes his hysteria saying, “I've been drinking too much. I'm out of prozac. I've got a cold” (DG 388). Lucas feels he is better off when he can explain his momentary passion as “all an undigested bit of beef” (DG 388), like Scrooge explaining seeing ghosts in A Christmas Carol. Still Lucas cannot stop longing. Listening to the manic ravings of De Kuff, a bipolar man who pretends Messiah status, Lucas thinks “that he would give anything to believe it all” (DG 401). But like earlier Stone protagonists of this nature—like most secular intellectuals—Lucas remains convinced that there is value in his detachment, his impartiality, his capacity to see both sides, sometimes his ability to despise both camps. Facing “the simple fact that he had nothing and no one” and trying “to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride” (DG 59), Lucas attempts, in Hemingway fashion, to make his existential loneliness a virtue. In regard to his book on the Jerusalem Syndrome, such desperate detachment might prove valuable.

Of course, Lucas exposes his real predilection for religion in his choice of topics for writing. While Israel may be the site of both political and religious controversy, given a choice between writing about the economic and political strife of the Gaza Strip and the religious turmoil of the Holy Land, Lucas opts for the latter, even if he disdains all sides. Similarly, his earlier book on Grenada was said by critics to be too concerned with Afro-Caribbean religion in lieu of politics. He nonetheless despises the very passions that drew him to this subject, so why does he not say a plague on both their houses and turn to another topic? Stone often underscores the questionable nature of certain beliefs held by some Israelis: Lucas has little patience with those who view Jews as the Chosen People, who believe that God has singled out Jews and has a special regard for them; he has little patience with those who believe in avenging any Jewish death with a multitude of Palestinian deaths; he is horrified by the living conditions inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza. Given his detachment, Lucas seems relieved to discover the ways in which Jews fall short; he is gratified to learn that Zealots “lapsed into banditry and murder, terrorizing the country” (DG 77), and that believers commit atrocities in the name of God. All the same, most of the sense of religious possibility in the book rests with Jews, or with Christians somehow united with Jews. Thus Lucas comes to doubt his doubt, wondering whether we, as skeptics, are any better off “because we know the old stories are lies” (DG 77). Lucas vacillates between discovering with relief some fact to discredit belief and wondering what we have gained by discrediting it.

Much of what characterizes Lucas, like what characterizes Holliwell and Converse before him, seems representative of most postmodern intellectuals. Lucas lives “a fastidious and anxiously examined life” (DG 54). He sees himself as “a man without a story secure from tribal delusions,” someone “not up to self invention” (DG 59). He doubts totally the efficacy of prayer. Where he differs is in his attraction to what is opposite to himself. Whereas Holliwell and Converse like to flirt cynically with those who believe, Lucas actively courts them. Holliwell makes love to the nun whose devotion fascinates him, a cynical and stupid act, as both he and Justin recognize immediately. By contrast, Lucas falls in love with Sonia, the Sufi Muslim who becomes a follower of De Kuff, the pretend Messiah. Of course, other distinctions between Justin and Sonia may justify Lucas's deeper involvement. At times Justin's political passion seems to be a form of self indulgence: she has a crush on a handsome priest; she romantically wants to have her flag for sunrise. Sonia, however, is deep and authentic. She is the beautiful mixed-race daughter of communists—black father, Jewish mother—who achieves through her fusion (race, religion and politics) something less vulnerable to criticism. She brings a harmony, revealing her nature best when singing. She is a beatific Sarah Vaughn. While she may have taken an occasional percodan for the “inner harmony” it promotes, she remains the healthiest of any Stone female protagonist. Once Sonia had lived in Cuba and found it a good life, one that was “plain, friendly and useful” (DG 108), and she seems capable of living a similarly sane life in the future.

Because of Sonia's magnetism, Lucas—unlike former Stone protagonists—seems ready to commit himself to her, even if he is unable to follow her religiously. It is a remarkable Stone protagonist who regards love as real. Sonia sees his spiritual bent and wants to draw that out. She tells Lucas, “You try to act like you're content not believing anything, and I don't think I buy it” (DG 168). Nor does the reader. She beckons him, crooning that for him to hear her song, he must follow her: “Yo no digo esta canción, Sino a quien conmigo va” (DG 270). She becomes a fleshly embodiment of spiritual wholeness. Nonetheless, Lucas cannot believe enough to follow her to where she imagines a purposeful existence. Lucas's imagined house with a picket fence is an upper West Side apartment from which they might go out to see Les Enfants du Paradis. Sonia's vision is of useful work in Liberia or Rwanda. Lucas wants to settle and have a family; she cannot imagine a family in such desperate places. So the novel ends with the love plot unresolved. Nonetheless, their relationship has more to it than does Holliwell's deflowering and betrayal of a nun.

Thus Damascus Gate turns out to be more a novel about seeking than a novel about the impossibility of belief. Indeed Stone's exploration of gnosticism leads away from heresy to belief. Just as a Jewish Catholic Priest (an impossible combination, yet representative, nonetheless, of Stone's variety of theism) tells Lucas, “If you seek God, some say you've found him” (DG 263), Stone reveals more something found than something lost. In fact, his belief is equal to his anger with certain aspects of conventional belief. At one moment Lucas catches himself praying:

“O Lord,” he heard himself say. The utterance filled him with loathing, that he was calling on God, on that Great Fucking Thing, the Lord of Sacrifices, the settler of riddles. Out of the eater comes forth meat. The poser of parables and shibboleths. The foreskin collector, connoisseur of humiliations, slayer by proxy of his thousands, his tens of thousands. Not peace but a sword. The Lunatic Spirit of the Near East, the crucified and crucifier, the enemy of all His own creation. Their God Damned God.

(DG 317)

The ordinary atheist has no reason to hate a nonexistent God; Lucas's tirade reveals he is enraged with the man upstairs. Consequently a belief in a God who is absent might avoid the pitfalls of “their Goddamned God.” Stone's allusions to Wallace Steven's “Sunday Morning” indicate that he sees a similarity between his difficulty with the Judeo-Christian tradition and the problem that Steven's complacent woman in a peignoir has with the “dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” Were we to push aside the God Lucas inwardly assails and she questions, the sky then would be a much friendlier sky, “Anything at all but that rich, indifferent blue” (DG 373). Stone's project seems to be one of rethinking God, putting aside that personal God who walks with us and talks with us, who takes a side, who demands ludicrous sacrifices. “Do you really think there's a thing in the sky that cares whether the passing asshole down below is Jewish or not?” Lucas asks (DG 167). An absent God would be preferable to this present one and all His consequences.

But from whence comes inspiration enough to carry on with life? Because Stone's protagonists seem often to be depressed men and women, they still need their moments of ecstasy, even if God is unavailable for revelation. They seem to need a God who can be experienced, so an absent God is an unlikely spiritual source. Stone's characters have traditionally found their delirium in drugs and alcohol, sex and language. Like so many other modern artists, Stone hints that in a world where God is absent, art may serve as a necessary substitute for a divine presence. He takes this position gingerly, however, having Lucas acknowledge simultaneously that “all of the grief of the twentieth century has come from trying to turn life into art” (DG 389). Yet Stone, whose attention to craft is great, who builds his novels in a Conradian fashion wherein “Fiction must justify itself in every line” (Woods 49), must here resolve whatever he might through the power of his narrative, and this time he cannot always pull it off. Damascus Gate is perhaps Stone's most erudite novel, despite mistakes that one reviewer has noted.⁸ He has managed to take a lifetime of autodidacticism on religion and superimpose it on an Israeli landscape, but while sentence by sentence his writing works, episode by episode it sometimes does not. Some of Stone's most important scenes are simultaneously his worst, and in terms of his story, this novel feels out of control. Intense ambivalence is difficult to dramatize.

For example, in one layered scene (Chapter 34), Lucas attends one of De Kuff's performances where a small new age group of devotees redolent of patchouli and a group of hecklers, including one Londoner who shouts repeatedly in a Cockney accent, “Excuse me,” interact. Thus the scene provides both ecstasy and a cynical commentary on it. Lucas rests ambiguously detached from both the preaching and the mockery. For the reader, also, the scene is unengaging, lacking either the humor or the intensity necessary to make it work. The reader stands between the hecklers and the ecstatic, not able to choose. In a considerably more successful scene later, Lucas's ambivalent and ambiguous position becomes vivid when he runs from a pursuing mob of Palestinians who shout at him, “Itbad-al-Yahud” (“Kill the Jew”), knowing he cannot turn to Israeli defense troops for help because they see him as the enemy also. Thus the man without a position finds both sides the enemy. Fear comes more naturally to Lucas than does divine ecstasy.

A culminating episode has a similarly Pynchon-like ambiguity. Here Lucas, sailing on a drug called Ecstasy, seemingly witnesses the Holy River Jordan change course. Is it just the drug, or is Lucas watching a miracle? Stone leads us to believe it is the drug, but his writing makes us want to believe in the miracle. Lucas's response partakes of both. “‘It's the Jordan,’ Lucas said. I see the god coming up out of the earth, he thought … But Lucas could not shake off his own terror. The fear of holiness” (DG 405). Holiness would disturb his hideout in doubt.

Lucas, who fears holiness, who regards himself as a “fucking weeper” (DG 399), who is capable of religious emotion, nevertheless falls short of belief, perhaps because he acknowledges perpetually—as he cautions Sonia—that “you have to be ready for this to fail you” (DG 389), and he cannot take the risk. But never before has a Stone protagonist been quite as theologically needy, not even Holliwell, who weeps at religious sentiment. Holliwell is fascinated by Justin but cannot make more than a sexual move in her direction. Converse needed there to be something; Marge required a certain “righteous satisfaction” found in drugs. But now we have a protagonist who weeps, who inadvertently prays, who curses God, who fears, who edges toward faith, and who ends hopeful. He concludes that despite losing everything in the end, “certain things of their nature cannot be taken away while life lasts. Some things can never be lost utterly that were loved in a certain way.” He goes home to a “different world” (DG 500).

So Stone has solved something here, has he not? While all previous Stone protagonists lacked faith in their inner resources, Lucas has found his. In a beautiful sentence fragment, “A land in exile, a God in His absconding, a love in its loss” (DG 500), Stone manifests the heavy pull of desire while telling us of absence. Art poignantly provides what experience denies.

Lucas recalls earlier the doctrines of the mystic, Isaac Luria: “The Almighty had absented himself in the first and greatest of mysteries, bequeathing to his exiled, orphaned creation emanations of himself. The force of these emanations was beyond the capacity of existence to contain them” (DG 130). In a sense, this theological formulation describes Stone's creation, a novel that intimates emanations whose force goes beyond the capacity of this book to contain them.

Notes

1. Writers are central to a number of Stone's fictions. Besides the novels considered here, Children of Light has a writer protagonist, and a number of the stories in the collection Bear and His Daughter feature poets as principals. Characteristically, these writers are disturbed by God's seeming absence and attempt to use art as a compensation for an empty universe.

2. See Fredrickson's, “Robert Stone's Decadent Leftists,” for a discussion of this problem. I argue that a number of factors—doubt of the viable self, doubt of the meaning of history, doubt of the possibility of communication—so deconstruct postmodern identity that these men feel impotent in the face of moral and political action.

3. See Hemingway's “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” where it is not only the usual drugs that are opiums of the people, but almost all human distractions from work to food to revolution.

4. Hicks, despite his disturbing behavior, has a certain tragic grandeur, according to Solataroff, that demonstrates Stone's skill in characterization (79).

5. George Packer divides Stone's principal characters into two types, “seekers” and “ironists” (117). Lucas definitely falls into the category of ironist, but this time the ironist edges toward seeking, indicating, perhaps, Stone's desire to reconcile the two modes.

6. What we see here is Stone seemingly pulling back from his postmodern sense of absence and turning toward an always inaccessible presence. His notion of desire resembles that of Jacques Lacan, only Lacan's idea concerns that which is lost to consciousness upon the advent of the signifier, whereas Stone evidently means something beyond the contents of the unconscious, something that signifiers, words loaded with desire, can suggest. Desire lingers even if that which we desire forever eludes us, forever remains beyond embodiment.

7. Stone, also a lapsed Catholic, is, according to one critic, the Catholic poète maudit (Packer 115).

8. Hillel Halkin scores Stone for the number of errors Stone makes about Judaism, Arabic, Hebrew, and Jerusalem, maintaining that he did not grasp his subject well enough to write about it and thus makes mistakes from mistranscribed notes.

Works Cited

Fredrickson, Robert. “Robert Stone's Decadent Leftists.” Papers on Language and Literature 32 (1996): 315-34.

Halkin, Hillel. “The Jerusalem Syndrome.” The New Republic 25 May 1998: 29-31.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.” The Snows of Kiliminjaro and Other Stories. New York: Scribners, 1927.

Leonard, John. “Leviathan.” Nation 13 Apr. 1992: 489.

Packer, George. “Robert Stone: The Funny Apocalypse.” Dissent 40 (1993): 115-19.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper, 1965.

Solotaroff, Robert. Robert Stone. New York: Twayne, 1995.

Stone, Robert. Damascus Gate. New York: Houghton, 1998.

———. Dog Soldiers. New York: Ballantine, 1973.

———. A Flag for Sunrise. New York: Knopf, 1981.

———. Outerbridge Reach. New York: Ticknor, 1992.

Woods, William C. “The Art of Fiction XC.” The Paris Review 27 (1985): 25-57.